


Rusted into the Places They Join

by Anonymous



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Friends, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Frenemies to uhhh, Friends to Enemies, Multi, War, Wings, time skip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-26
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-27 13:09:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17162546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Yeah, I surrender,” Entrapta said. “And boy, I have great news for you guys. First off, thanks for saving me again. And I know we’re going to do that whole thing, how can you trust me, what should you do with me, what if I tell the Horde everything, and all that—”“No, we got it,” Bow said. “Why don’t we skip to the news?”The kids grow into the war. And get some new toys! And old frenemies!





	Rusted into the Places They Join

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes: the Adora/Bow/Glimmer will be mostly in the background and you can expect the rating to go up to M or E in the future.

“Hello! I’m here! Wanna take me prisoner?” Entrapta said, waving her hair. Her hair was just about all any of them could see of her. The rest of her was sinking into a pit of quicksand. Around her, Horde tanks and soldiers—mostly corpses at this point—made blubbering noises as they were swallowed by the sand. It sounded too much like drowning. 

“Ugh, not again,” Glimmer said. 

“We kind of have to!” Bow said. “We can’t leave her to die here. It’d be so sad.”

“Especially not after what happened the first time,” Entrapta said, and her hair, or at least, the pigtail that wasn’t glubbing downwards into the quicksand, slumped down. “When you abandoned me and left me to the Horde.” 

“Ugh!” said Glimmer. “Yes, sure, we’re taking you prisoner.” 

“Day one of capture,” Entrapta said. “Guilt trips _work_. Can’t wait to use it to negotiate for better living quarters this time. Real small food, not just the cut up stuff. And maybe even—”

She and Bow went over to Entrapta to free her. Entrapta had passed between the Horde and Bright Moon three times since the war started. Probably more times than that. She bet her mother would know, since she kept a log of important recruitments and losses, but her mother was back in Bright Moon and would probably discourage her from taking Entrapta on again. 

They grabbed onto Entrapta’s arms and tugged. The quicksand sucked her back in. And when Glimmer tried to teleport Entrapta out, it was like she was yanking her out of a vacuum pulling her all the way to the bottom of the planet. The warm feeling in her back, the one she had been trying to ignore for the last few weeks, became a blunt pain, like something was trying to break out of her spine, and she nearly dropped both Entrapta and herself back into the quicksand. But she pulled them out, materializing two feet above another quicksand pit, then, after they both yelled and flailed, next to Bow, eight inches off the air. They landed, Entrapta on her butt and Glimmer on all fours, digging her fingers into the dirt. 

“Yeowch!” Entrapta said. “Bet that was tricky, huh! Add to Enemy Notes—I mean Ally Notes. ‘Bad at teleporting people out of quicksand.’ Hmm, hmm.” 

Bow put his hand on her back, then helped her up. “That’s been happening more often,” he said. “Are you okay?” 

“I’m okay. I think I pulled something,” she said, and rolled her neck. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Don’t get me wrong, the wings are really cool,” Bow said. He was tying up Entrapta while dodging her hair’s attempts to measure his biceps and waist. “Although I’ve always wondered—design-wise, they’re kind of redundant.” 

“My wings would not be redundant,” Glimmer said, gritting her teeth. The small nubs on her back had, during the battle, pushed more of themselves out of her skin. A pair of wet trickles ran down her back. 

“Like I said, also incredibly cool. So many cool points.” 

The stabbing feeling faded. She helped Bow tie up Entrapta and together, they took Entrapta back to the command post. The post was more of a cluster of tents and, Glimmer suspected, a Horde invention Adora had imported to the rest of Etheria. That and the actual marshalling of an army, and supply chains, and a number of really terrible inspirational speeches where you could see Adora inside of She-Ra thinking things like, “This is okay! I’m okay! We’re not doomed, we got this! Unless we don’t got this. I don’t got this. I’m pumped!” 

“We should blindfold her,” Glimmer said, realizing too late that Entrapta had never seen this side of their operations. Chances were, Entrapta would be back in the Horde in six months, ready to report everything back to Catra and Scorpia. Unless the two of them had bigger plans. No one had spotted them in weeks. 

The last battle had been an involved one. It was one of the Rebellion’s rare offensive campaigns, using Sandra’s secure kingdom to reclaim Pyramid City and the surrounding towns. Glimmer and Bow had been in charge of wiping out a Horde unit trying to flank the main column. They knew, heading back, that the battle had likely been won. At the command post, people were flowing in and out, some holding papers above their heads or shouting, “Where is—” or, “Uhh, I need a signature?” The work of victory had already begun. 

Adora had already made it back and was bustling around the special table she insisted on having at every post, one with a map and models she could push around with her sword while she came up with new plans. Unlike the other soldiers, who all seemed relieved that the hard part was over, Adora’s limbs had the eagerness of a sharp knife, waiting to cut again. 

“Hi guys!” she said when they entered her tent. “And—oh. Hi, Entrapta.” 

“Hi, Adora,” Entrapta said. She had already taken off her blindfold with her hair. “Wow, wow, your hair is getting taller. Do you ever wonder whether it makes you less aerodynamic?” 

“No?” Adora said. “Wait! You don’t get to ask that. So you surrender?”

“Yeah, I surrender,” Entrapta said. “And boy, I have great news for you guys. First off, thanks for saving me again. And I know we’re going to do that whole thing, how can you trust me, what should you do with me, what if I tell the Horde everything, and all that—”

“No, we got it,” Bow said. “Why don’t we skip to the news?” 

“I detected a giant hunk of First One’s tech a few weeks ago, but Catra won’t go anywhere near it. ‘No way,’ she says. So, I figure, now that I’m with a bunch of magic princesses, why not see if you guys will go get it for me? Big, big hunk,” Entrapta said, holding her actual arms far apart. 

“Can’t you keep your arms in the restraints?” Glimmer said. Entrapta paid her no attention. It sounded like she was used to people telling her to stay tied up.

“Why won’t Catra go after the tech?” Adora said. “Is it in a volcano or something?” 

“It’s not in a volcano. But it’s somewhere very, very tricky. It’ll take a lot of work to get there. Luckily, I have just what we need to get you there in one of my secret fortresses.”

Glimmer exchanged looks with Bow and Adora. They looked about as equally unimpressed with the turn of events as she did. 

“I can give you the coordinates and you can go do your quick teleport-in-and-out and then boom, we’ll be ready,” Entrapta said, pulling a tablet out of one of her pockets and handing it over. “As you can tell from the diagram, it’s a She-Ra problem, heh, heh.” 

“I can’t tell,” Adora said, handing the screen over to Bow, who passed it to Glimmer. “Nothing on this screen tells me what makes it a She-Ra problem.” 

“It’s a crystal power amplifier with a big battery. No having to unjuice your allies to get that sweet power buff. Very, veeeery useful, no one’s seen it just yet.” She poked a few buttons on the pad with her hair, and said, “I’m thinking Bertha or Jenna for a name.” 

 

##

 

Bow was the one who noticed the blood. 

“Oh, whoa!” he said. “Glimmer, are you okay? Are you hurt?” 

Adora looked over, and immediately had to bite down on her lip to stop herself from gasping. From behind, the back of Glimmer’s shirt was black with blood. 

They were on a transport ship, on their way to Entrapta’s fortress. These ships usually had a med kit. Adora went looking for one, kicking at the panels until one popped out. The windows had a view of red and gray sand. By the time she was ready, Bow had taken off Glimmer’s cape to reveal the bent, twisted knobs, brown with rusty blood, poking out of her shirt. They were probably the only ugly thing from Bright Moon Adora had seen since she arrived, and something about that made her want to reach out and tug on them until the entire wing popped out. She opened up the med kit and was confronted with fewer tourniquets and needles than she expected. So much gauze, she thought, admiring the pile of thin, white cloth. 

Glimmer was on the floor and on her stomach, legs kicked up behind her and expression annoyed with her and Bow for caring. Adora squatted down next to her and said, “Does it hurt a lot?” 

“Not now,” Glimmer said. “It’s fine. I can handle it.” 

“It’s a good thing we’re not in the middle of a campaign right now. You’ll have plenty of time to recover.” 

“That’s—” Bow said. He rubbed Glimmer’s lower back, as though to remind her to be quiet. They often did that to each other—and to her, she reminded herself—as a way of asking the other to hold their tongue and let them be the tactful one. “That’s not as sad as ‘I should hide when I’m sick so people won’t kill me,’ so I’m going to take that as progress.” He was fiddling around with one of his arrows, and after some poking, one popped out two hot towels. He knelt beside Glimmer and started washing her back. He held out the other towel to Adora. “Here. We should do this together.” 

One of the more confusing aspects of Bright Moon was that there was so much kissing. It had snuck up on her over the years. They went from sleeping over in each other’s rooms in their own separate spots to sharing beds to kissing in them, and then kissing outside of them. Kissing in bed was something Adora knew probably happened to a lot of people—at least, that was what Catra had told her when she asked about the sounds in the barracks—but outside of it always caught her by surprise. And it was so inefficient! She could have finished cleaning off Glimmer’s back in a minute if she weren’t so distracted. And sometimes, especially if she was tired, she’d start thinking about tactics, and feel bad. Glimmer and Bow deserved to have a friend who wasn’t thinking about tactics while exercising tongue. But it was always nice to have them there, and she didn’t actually want them to stop. 

“You know,” Adora said, “I really think they’re going to be pretty once they come in.” 

“But what am I going to _do_ with them?” Glimmer said. She balled up her hands and raised them in the air. Bow took a hold of them and shook them together. 

“It’s like having a free vantage point,” Adora said. 

“Huh,” Bow said. “I was thinking it’d be nice to touch them.” 

“And it’d be nice to touch them,” she said, feeling awkward. 

“I guess that’s okay,” Glimmer said. She rolled her shoulders and winced. Beneath her freshly scrubbed cape, the little nubby wings twitched back and forth. 

They were all cleaned up by the time the ship landed in the ruins of a collapsing pyramid. Entrapta had mentioned the chief virtue of this secret fortress was its location and how hard it was to navigate the area. 

Entering the fortress wasn’t much trouble. There weren’t many of Entrapta’s robots, and the ones that were there were dispatched quickly enough: an arrow here, a slice of the sword there. Some of them didn’t even have weapons installed. They’d approach and a panel would open up, and nothing would happen. The bot would shut the panel and scuttle away. 

About halfway down, they ran into a fork in the road. 

“We should split up,” Adora said. “Glimmer and Bow, you guys take the left fork and we’ll all report back here in an hour and a half. Let’s synchronize our watches.”

“My watch is already synced to the harmonium clock, so you should sync your watches to mine,” Bow said. “Also, look! I can turn it into an arrow.” 

“My watch is also synced to the harmonium clock, so you should be following—”

“—into an arrow for, anyway?” 

“I’m surrounded by doubters and haters wherever I go,” he said. 

They synced their watches and went on their way. “Be careful!” they whisper-shouted at her as they separated. 

Truthfully, Adora was glad Bow and Glimmer were together; she suspected the wings hurt more than Glimmer was letting on. She would have made Glimmer stay on the ship if she didn’t think it’d make Glimmer mad and run into the pyramid after them, anyway. And she was noticing, as her path took her further underground, that some of the light crystals in the wall had been smashed, and that there was fresh blood on the ground. It smeared against her fingers when she touched it. And the air had a different feel than it had higher up: a current of human warmth coming from the dirt, the humidity of blood and someone’s panting breaths. 

Adora raised her sword against the dark and transformed into She-Ra. From ahead, she heard a foot against the earth, a growl of frustration. Adora’s ears went hot. A beam of light swung out from her sword, and a dark shape flattened itself to the wall. A terrible fullness rose up in her chest. 

“Catra!” she said, pointing the sword straight ahead. “Show yourself!” 

And there she was. Grimacing, with blood rolling from above her eye, down her cheek and jaw, clutching her side with one hand and dragging a bag with the other. When the light hit her, she dropped the bag. She raised a hand to her eye and her knees buckled. She turned her head away from the light. 

“Of course it’s you,” Catra said. 

Adora didn’t lower her sword. She had seen Catra like this before, wounded and bleeding, and it didn’t hurt anymore to stay in place instead of running to her aid. “What are you doing down here?” she said. 

“Same thing you are.” 

“I don’t think so.” 

Catra’s tail lashed out. Adora walked forward, and Catra pushed herself off the wall. She removed her hand from her side and shook it a few times. Drops of blood splattered on Adora’s leg as she walked by. 

“Where are you going?” Catra said. 

“To get what I came for,” she said. 

“Are you kidding me?” And then: “Hey! Adora!” 

Behind her, Adora heard Catra’s claws scrape against the stone walls, and then a thud. She had fallen to the ground. Adora stopped, then let herself turn around. Catra was pushing herself back up. All of the coldness Adora associated with Hordak’s second-in-command, the sneer, the annoying sense that she knew something Adora didn’t, was gone. That didn’t mean that Catra didn’t have something planned for her, or that this wasn’t some new tactic. For all she knew, this Catra could be a holographic projection, a trick to keep her on this path, while the real Catra clawed at Glimmer’s wings and snapped Bow’s arrows. Entrapta had guided her here, after all, and Entrapta always seemed more comfortable with the Horde than in Bright Moon. Maybe, after all that time in the Horde, Entrapta learned to enjoy scheming, instead of causing disasters and harm through pure enthusiasm for technology. 

Even if that were true, she couldn’t leave Catra there without confirming it for herself. She wiped her finger along the red drops on her leg and it smeared red across her thigh. She rubbed the blood between her fingers until it dried. 

“What happened to you?” she said. She bent down next to Catra. 

“Ambushed. By… you wouldn’t be interested, anyway.” 

“Shadow Weaver?” 

Catra scoffed. “No. Try Captain Blast.” 

“Captain—sorry, I don’t know… A new princess? Oh! Is it one of Entrapta’s new robots? Or—”

“Kyle! It’s Kyle, okay?” 

“Oh, Kyle.” Adora thought about that for a moment, then said, “He really got you.” 

Catra’s ears flicked down and back. There was nothing submissive about the gesture. If anything, it showed her disdain. “Don’t you have some business to do down there?” she said. 

“I can’t leave you to bleed out here, either.” Even as she said that, and even as Catra bled out in front of her, she still had her sword in her hand. She pushed Catra back against the wall and forced her arm away from the wound so she could see more. She recognized the clump of Horde healing glue on the front of Catra’s suit, keeping the worst wound contained, but there were other injuries: a large burn, scorching her fur down, on her right shoulder and a still-bleeding blast wound on her left calf. Once Adora finished looking, Catra shoved her away, checking her with her burned shoulder. Adora took a step back. “You’ll live.” 

“Wow. Who could’ve guessed? I’ve been down here for how many freaking hours already and now the mighty She-Ra has blessed me with life.” 

“Sorry. I don’t have any medical supplies with me now. And I have to keep going.” She meant to turn and keep walking into the dark, but when she tried to turn away, her neck and sword arm trembled from tension. Her jaw clenched and wouldn’t unclench, even as pain from her teeth shot up to her temples. She never felt like herself around Catra anymore. These days, she felt more and more like She-Ra. 

Catra’s tail lashed a few times. “You’re not taking me?” 

“You can call for Horde back up once I’m gone.” 

“I—I don’t have back up. If you’re here, you’ve caught Entrapta. Scorpia was captured by Blast in the ambush. I don’t know what they’re going to do to her.” 

“You have more underlings. Call them.” 

“Adora, come on. You won’t take me as prisoner?”

“Of course not!” Adora said. She shouted it and it hurt her throat. And it shocked the both of them: Catra suddenly low on the ground, ears flat against her head, and Adora finding herself holding her sword at the ready, before lowering her arm. “You’re the enemy—you’re Hordak’s second—and you’ve tricked me every time you could. You really expect me to believe that _Kyle_ did this to you? The second I turn away, you’ll laugh about how stupid I was to fall for your lie.” 

“Oh, so it’s my fault that you let yourself be blinded by your own feelings so many times, and that’s why you can’t trust me?” Catra said. “I’ve helped you plenty. I’ve given you your sword back, I—”

“Kidnapped and tortured my friends, attacked my allies, tried to kill me—”

“Just because I’ve beaten you doesn’t mean we can’t make this work.” 

“You haven’t beaten me.” 

“I have. Plenty of times. Both on the field and one-on-one. Come on. Why won’t you admit it?” She pushed herself off the wall, swaying slightly. She lurched forward, one step, then two, then fell back against the wall. 

It wasn’t entirely true. But it also wasn’t entirely wrong. Catra had “won,” if she meant her new command, or capturing allied territory that the Princess Alliance had to claw back, or even one-on-one, luring Adora into disadvantageous positions. And it was true that Adora was always aware that even as She-Ra, she was not entirely safe. If Catra wanted Adora to feel like they were equals in combat, then she already had it. None of that made Catra “better” than her. If anything, it degraded her. And the Rebellion was no longer losing the war. 

“If you’ve beaten me, then that’s another reason why I should leave you here,” Adora said. She turned away and kept walking underground. 

Once she was far enough, she swung her sword around her head, not caring that it made an awful and high scratching sound on the walls, or that Catra, with her sharp senses, could almost certainly hear her. She stabbed at the earth a few times, and then pulled the sword out and rubbed the crossguard and grip a few times. 

“Sorry,” she said. “Ow!” A handful of loose pebbles fell on her head. 

There wasn’t much down this path except robot parts and what looked like prototypes for future android servants. Most of the rooms were unfinished. Adora checked her watch. She still had twenty minutes until she had to rendezvous with Glimmer and Bow. That meant she had twenty minutes to figure out what she was going to do with Catra. There had been no traps down here. And even if Kyle was the least likely person to get the jump on Catra, it wasn’t like Catra didn’t have enemies within the Horde. The Rebellion had informants that had confirmed as much. 

Which meant—what? She was supposed to take Catra back, nurse her to health, and then curse herself when she got scratched? It’d happen, she knew it would. The second Catra got better, she’d run straight back to the Horde, this time with the knowledge of Bright Moon’s terrain. 

She climbed back up the tunnel. Catra was where Adora had found her. Her arms were crossed. She had wiped some of the blood away from her face. 

“Found what you were looking for?” Catra said. When Adora didn’t say anything, she smirked. “That crystal amp?” 

“How—”

Catra ripped the cover off her bag. Inside was a massive, heavy object, one of Entrapta’s designs. Of course Catra had gotten to it first. And of course she had let Adora go searching for it, just to rub it into her face. 

“I need somewhere to stay,” Catra said. “And you need this if you want whatever Entrapta has planned for you. You can have this and the second I’m better, whoosh. I’ll be gone. Okay?” 

Everything Catra said came from a place of barely disguised desperation. Bright Moon was her last chance. She had hoped Catra might come back to Bright Moon with her someday. Getting it this way felt sour. 

“You have to promise that you won’t hurt anyone,” she said. 

“Don’t get me wrong, princess. You’re not even part of my plans right now. You’re just a means to my ends.”

“Sure,” Adora said. 

She placed her sword on her back. With one hand, she picked up Entrapta’s device, and with the other, she pulled Catra up by the arm to take her back to the ship. Ah, she thought. They were heavy.


End file.
